In October 1957, Field Museum herpetologist Karl Patterson Schmidt was bitten on the thumb by a boomslang, a highly venomous snake native to Sub-Saharan Africa. He then kept track of his symptoms in a journal as the venom coursed through his body, eventually killing him in less than 24 hours. Newspapers around the country reported on Schmidt’s death diary, including in the Tucson Daily Citizen, October 3, 1957:

In the late 1700s, Swiss clockmaker Pierre Jacquet-Droz created dolls that could seemingly spring to life – playing the harpsichord, drawing a picture, or writing a note. These dolls, who look like they wouldn’t be out of place in a modern-day horror movie, still exist and are on display at the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History. They are some of the earliest examples of robots, or automata, with amazingly complicated components. See them come alive:

In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli’s identification of canali on Mars (meaning “channels”, but mistranslated as “canals”) fueled speculative fire about life on other planets, both in fiction and nonfiction. Mathematician and astronomer Percival Lowell fully believed Martians existed, and in 1894 built an observatory in Flagstaff, AZ, specifically to observe Mars and detect life there. Many people believed Lowell’s account, including scientist and inventor, Nicola Tesla, who thought that communication with Mars might be possible. Science was bolstered by literature with books like HG Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), serials like Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898), and plays like A Message from Mars (1899). Other fiction writers in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries described life on Mars as having evolved similarly to life on Earth with humanoid life forms that had blue, red, and green skin. Luckily, they did speak English!